Recovery of Tartaric Acid from Aqueous Solution by Liquid Membrane Technique: Optimization by Taguchi Design of Experimental Methodology

The transport of tartaric acid through a bulk liquid membrane (BLM) was investigated. The effect of solvent type, carrier concentration, temperature, salt type and salt concentration in the feed phase on the transport efficiency of tartaric acid through the BLM was studied. 27 experiments were performed based on the Taguchi design of experiment, and the results were analyzed with Minitab 16 software. The results indicated that the maximum extraction (92.53%) was obtained under optimum conditions including methyl isobutyl ketone as a solvent, trioctylamine at a concentration of 30% (v/v) as a carrier, a temperature of 25 degrees C and potassium nitrate at a concentration of 30% (w/v) as a salt in the feed phase. The results illustrated that the experimental error compared with the predicted value by the software was 6.69%; therefore, the Taguchi model has an acceptable capability of prediction for the tartaric acid extraction process. In addition, two irreversible first-order sequential chemical reactions were used to explain the kinetic model of the pertraction process in BLM systems.